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Last Topic's Ratings:
Crash Bandicoot 2 - GGGGGGAGGGGGG - 96% (13) (1 SR)
Expert - GG - 100% (2)
Felony 11-79 - AGG - 83% (3)
Freestyle Boardin' 99 - BB - 0% (2)
Nectaris: Military Madness - GGG - 100% (3)
Yacht Racing Game 1999 - BG - 50% (2)
The consensus is pretty clear, Crash Bandicoot 2 is a big improvement over the first game. Beyond this, it was cool to see the twin sleeper hits of Expert and Nectaris.
Games for this topic:
Aquanaut's Holiday
Big Bass World Championship
Creature Shock
Rascal Racers
SaGa Frontier
Spot Goes to Hollywood
I'm interested to see what they did with the original Aquanaut's Holiday, as the PS3 game is very cool but it seems like it'd be hard to pull that off on PS1 hardware.
Aquanaut's Holiday - B
ReplyDeleteBig Bass World Championship - B
Creature Shock - B
Rascal Racers - B
SaGa Frontier - G
Spot Goes to Hollywood - A
Aquanaut's Holiday is an interesting concept, but I feel the PS1 hardware can't really do it justice. In many ways, Aquanaut's Holiday is a very simple game, you are simply dumped in the ocean with no kind of story or objectives of any kind and you can explore in any direction to look for interesting things to see. The problem is that the low-resolution 3D graphics result in the ocean floor rendering as a mostly featureless blue surface devoid of any of the visual charms of the real thing. The fish you encounter are so low-resolution that they're not very interesting to look at, and even when you do find various things there's little you can do with them. The controls for the sub (is it a sub?) are also kinda clunky, not helped by the fact that the game's framerate frequently chugs, even when nothing particularly interesting is happening onscreen. The side game about building the coral reef is a bit more interesting, but there's not much to do here either. You just earn blocks by wandering around (I think it's purely based on how long you play) and arrange them into various shapes to attract the fish. There's potential here and you can finally see it realized in the PS3 game, which is gorgeous, but it's really just not quite there yet. If this had been saved for next gen it would have been a drastically better title.
Big Bass World Championship shows a little bit of potential but it can't really escape its budget game origins. Like about 90% of fishing games out there, this is another bass-only fishing game where it's divided into championships about catching the most bass within a given time limit. As with some other games this generation, the lakes are rendered in full 3D and you can explore them using a boat, which works decently well. One thing this game does better than most is that finding bass to catch is not particularly difficult, the lake is full of them so if you go to any location where the fish finder shows fish, you'll find some. Actually catching them is the problem, though. For starters, the game has a lot of short but frequent loading screens. When you switch lures, it needs to load. When you switch from the above-water to underwater cam, it loads (which you'll be doing twice on every cast). This makes the entire experience much more tedious than it needs to be. Once you finally have a fish on the line, you need to hook it, which as far as I can tell is done with square + dpad up, then basically just hold square to pull it in. Sometimes you'll stop making progress, in which case you should release square momentarily to put slack on the line, but there's very little nuance here, which pretty much sums up the entire game. It's a little closer to having the right idea, but no part of the experience is very engaging.
Creature Shock is an absurdly bad game. It's an entirely FMV-based game, similar to something like Dragon's Lair, but minus any charm or anything that that game might have had. When you're not watching your character very slowly move through boring corridors (which comprises about 80% of the game), you're engaging in lightgun-style duels, but these are absurdly terrible. Due to the game's FMV-based nature, any time an enemy moves or attacks the game has to load, which freezes your cursor, making aiming feel extremely awkward, particularly as most enemies have only extremely small vulnerable points that are targetable for a few frames at most. The playstation version of the game also cuts out the parts of the game where you pilot the ship, which are present in most other ports of the game, so this version should be especially avoided, though I doubt you'd want to play any version of it.
It's kind of telling that as bad as Rascal Racers is, after the preceding games I'm at least glad it has something resembling gameplay. Rascal Racers is basically the most basic kart racer of all time and has pretty much nothing going for it. Unlike pretty much every other kart racer in existence, this game has no powerslide move of any kind, and the controls are hideously stiff. There's only a few weapons available and they feel lame to use, races have too many laps and are generic, and basically, the game just sucks in every respect, except maybe for its visuals, which I guess are all right. Still, there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to play this.
DeleteSurprisingly, Spot Goes to Hollywood is actually a totally different and somewhat better game compared to the Genesis version. While the premise and level themes are very similar, the gameplay is completely different and generally better. It's still an isometric platformer, but the levels are generally thinner and more compact, which helps the pacing of the game and makes it far easier to keep track of enemies and other obstacles. I feel like this game's presentation is generally pretty good, sound and music is a particular highlight, and the cutscenes are also pretty well done. Control is also fine and the camera perspective generally makes it easy enough to figure out the level design, and there's a decent amount of variety in the levels in the game as well. One thing I find weird about the game is that while collecting 100 spots earns an extra life, your count is reset to 0 if you die, making this a fairly unreliable method of earning lives unless you're really good at the game. Overall the game is okay and is decently long, particularly if you're trying to get all of the hidden stars for 100%, though it still feels fairly forgettable and doesn't have nearly as much appeal as the original game. If only they had stuck a little closer to the original formula for the sequel.
SaGa Frontier is a very interesting game in a lot of ways. It's another PS1 RPG from Squaresoft and it's definitely got some of that PS1 charm, but you certainly shouldn't mistake it as being "standard squaresoft fare" as it's very different from pretty much everything else they put out this generation. For starters, SaGa Frontier is an extremely ambitious game. Like the Romancing SaGa games, SaGa Frontier allows you to choose from one of 7 different protagonists (there was supposed to be an 8th, but they were cut), but unlike in some of the past games where their paths tend to converge pretty quickly, here they each have an entirely unique questline and you're encouraged to finish the game with all of them. The game is also almost completely nonlinear, each character has a handful of story missions that you need to complete at some point, but the moment you complete the very beginning of your scenario you can go pretty much anywhere in the game, recruiting characters and completing side quests in any order you want. The side quests are generally fairly similar for each character, but various limitations exist in terms of who can complete what and when and which optional characters will join you, which makes them feel a bit different from each other. Then there's the game's combat system, which also features a lot of unique mechanics. There are four different character types in the game, humans, mystics, mechs, and monsters, all of whom learn new abilities and power up in totally different ways. The system used to power up monsters is so complex that it basically needs an entire guide to explain it, but once you get the gist of it it's actually quite interesting. Suffice it to say that this is a very unique game with a ton going on. There are some big caveats, though. The game was clearly somewhat too ambitious for its own good, as it shows many signs of being rushed and almost nothing in the game is properly explained to you. The game's dialogue is far too sparse in almost all situations, which leads me to think it probably wasn't translated well, and the resulting lack of direction about what you're intended to do means you'll likely need to use a guide frequently, and the game's story never really feels engaging. The game's dungeons are also big and labyrinthine and exits to maps are often not well marked, which may also require you to use a guide often. The game's combo attack and monster absorption systems are cool, but aren't explained at all in the game proper, also forcing you to use a guide to know how these work. Enemies scale to your level (as they would have to considering you can do the game in almost any order), but this can result in you trying to level up to beat a boss, only for it to level up more than you do. Overall, while the game is extremely unique and interesting, it's also not very polished at all. If you're willing to make heavy use of a guide there is a lot of interesting stuff here, though I feel like given the nonlinear nature of the game it would be nicer if you could just discover the game at your own pace rather than being forced to use a guide. On the plus side, Square is releasing a remastered version of this game that will re-insert the cancelled 8th character and also looks like it contains a redone translation, so it might be best to play that version if you want to play it, but it's still a very unique experience nonetheless.
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